Doesn't really change the issue of alliances at the core, but opens them to some exceptional abuse depending on the game stage. If you are facing off against an alliance in a normal game, then you are most likely out numbered as it is. Having one side in a war suddenly get double the attack potential, regardless of how strong everyone's economic bases are, can quickly become horribly unbalanced and even worse than it normally would be.

This is made worse if you do not put strong limits on how units can be used, or how often they can attack. What does it matter if you have the better economy to afford to build and field more units if a vastly inferior force still becomes an equal because they can just keep reusing the same unit to attack with while much of the 'superior' force sits and is unused?

You could have both unit action points and player action points. Normally, telling a unit to do something would consume an equal quantity of unit and player action points, and would require enough of both. If you run out of player action points, you can't move any more units, even if they still have points left. Conversely, if a unit runs out of action points, they can't move any more even if the player still has action points; needs to move a different unit that still has action points left.

The player action points could be increased over the course of the game through technologies, buildings, or other improvements that contribute to logistics and organizational ability. The sort of thing that a player needs to invest in. If they invest too late, they might find themselves incapable of responding quickly when the need arises. If they invest too early, they might hurt their economy elsewhere and not be able to fully utilize their awesome logistics. Of course, determining the "correct" time to upgrade would likely be heavily dependent upon the state of the game, and thus on the player's skill at reading the state of the game and choosing actions appropriately.

Another way to adjust this mechanic might be to have leader units. If a non-leader unit is in range of a leader unit, then taking an action only spends unit action points, and leaves player action points untouched. This could make leader units highly valuable and strongly affect tactical considerations in order to keep a leader unit in the midst of action, but also as safe as possible.

in general, action points in turn based games are a way of modeling time.

actions take time.

this time is measured in action points.

there's only so much time in a game turn.

so each unit can only do so much per game turn (move some distance, attack some number of times, load/unload, some combo thereof, etc).

thus, each unit get assigned "action points" to model how much they can do in one turn.

while pooling action points may result in interesting new gameplay, it also sort of undermines the original purpose of action point modeling - thus leading to a less realistic simulation.

while pooling action points may result in interesting new gameplay, it also sort of undermines the original purpose of action point modeling - thus leading to a less realistic simulation.

I was kind of interpreting pooled action points more as organization or group coordination. Not enough action points means that a unit doesn't know what to do, and thus does nothing. (Or perhaps defaults to an extra-defensive fortifying action.)

I wonder if there might be other metaphors for pooled action points that could make reasonable sense to a player and would lead to other game mechanic ideas. Energy/fuel could be one, especially if the distribution of fuel were abstracted away, and the player simply had access to n units of fuel per turn based on production/trade. In a robotic future setting, centralized computer resources might be a source of pooled points; that would likely be similar to my earlier logistics concept. But could go in another direction if a robotic unit would keep following its last supplied orders until given new orders, and the number of new orders that can be given is what limits the player each turn.

I was kind of interpreting pooled action points more as organization or group coordination.

yes, action points could mean different things in different games. unfortunately its a vague term.

it also depends on what one's goals are.

action points are one way to model time costs on a unit basis in turn based games.

IE it is a game mechanic which has been devised to model some aspect of the simulation in question.

changing the mechanic may make the model less accurate / realistic.

changing what action points represent means your now attempting to model something other than time available to an individual unit during as turn.

the question is, "what are you now attempting to model?" and "does that have anything to do with the simulation? or is it simply a contrived game mechanic?".

the usually process in writing modeling and simulation software is to determine what you want to model in the simulation - such as time available to individual units during a turn, and then select a modeling method (a game mechanic, such as action points) and implement it.

buy arbitrarily pooling action points, you break the original modeling of time available to individual units per turn, and replace it with - what? what does pooled action points model? nothing realistic that i can think of offhand....

... thus leading to a less realistic simulation.

However, I'm inclined to argue that the next question is then--for each game--"how important is that"? In some games it may undermine the experience that the designer is attempting to create, while in others strict simulation was never a goal.

That said, either way, I think that Andy Gainey makes good points above about potential metaphors that could be applied to pooled action points.

I don't really play strategy games, so I'm hesitant to opine much further. Conceptually, I do like the idea of pooled action points--not more or less than other methods, such as individual action points, but simply as another option and something different.

(On a side-note, I actually once used pooled action points for a sort of computer board-game that I put together once, as I recall.)

what does pooled action points model?

I think that this has been somewhat answered, but to give an answer myself: it can model time, just as does an individual action-point system. However, where individual action points model the time available to each unit, pooled action points model the time available to the commander: he can send out only so many orders at once.